Projects

If you have a project that you want to work on at the Hackathon, please describe it here.

Since Hackathons are great for teamwork, consider joining one of the projects mentioned below. If you're interested in one of these projects, add your name to the list of hackers under that project.

Darcs

A large chunk of the Darcs team will be at ZuriHac. We would be delighted for you to join in and do some hacking with us. To help you get started, we have a big list of ProbablyEasy bugs to chew on. See our sprint page for more details!

Need for speed

In 2006 the Python community had a NeedForSpeed sprint. Some Haskell libraries, like the containers library, could use some benchmarks (using e.g. Criterion) and hopefully some performance improvements.

event

The event library will hopefully replace GHC's I/O manager with a more scalable implementation, based on better data structures and more efficient system calls (e.g. epoll/kqueue).

The project is nearing completion, but more testing and benchmarking is needed. The code also needs to be merged into GHC.

Hackers: Johan Tibell

Data.Binary on continuations

The Data.Binary library provides blazing fast reading/writing of binary data. There are a few things I'd like to see improved, hopefully before inclusion in the Haskell Platform:

It's not possible to use the library on large inputs without resorting to lazy I/O. By changing the underlying implementation to use continuations and expose a continuations based API we can process large inputs without resorting to unsafe operations. This needs to be done while still offering good performance.

The library lacks error handling. The above implementation would naturally support communicating errors to the user. There are however other ways to achieve the same result.

The library currently includes two separate features in one package, low-level binary parsing of simple types (e.g. Ints and Words) and a data format (the Binary typeclass). Arguably the library should be split in two.

The binary data format should be documented and it should be clear which types are guaranteed to have the same encoding for the foreseeable future.

Comment by Jürgen "Jutaro" Nicklisch: I've hacked an addition package to binary: binary-shared, which gives sharing of data for serialization and deserialization. For my app this gives a huge saving of space and time and I think it would be reasonable to integrate this into the binary package.

I am happy to see anyone interested in the project, please contact me.

Hackers: Roman Cheplyaka

JPEG-decoder

Package stb-image contains a JPEG-decoding function, but it is a wrapper around a C function. Obviously, it is not the Haskell spirit to let C do the dirty work!

I once wrote a JPEG-decoder purely in Haskell. It is optimized for readability rather than speed.
During the Hackathon, I want to:

package it under Cabal

try and optimize it (using bytestreams (or bitstreams?))

see whether it competes with the C implementation...

Help of hackers who know bytestreams is appreciated (you don't need knowledge of JPEG to participate in this project).

Hackers: Jeroen Fokker.

hledger

If there are any hledger users among participants, we could hack on it.
First of all, hledger needs some refactoring and API cleaning. Then many nice features could be added.

Hackers: Roman Cheplyaka

BlazeHtml

There are several HTML combinator libraries on hackage, but we still need one that is *really* fast. This is attempt to tackle the problem described here. A simple API proposal can be found here, but that's only one idea. Everyone is welcome to hack on this (new) project.

Hackers: Jasper Van der Jeugt

Pesto

I will be working on the Pesto web framework. Rather than a regular framework, it is a collection of orthogonal modules for the model, view and controller part. I will try to release the regular-web package and possibly work on the Basil library.

Hackers: Chris Eidhof

Experience

Please list projects with which you are familiar. This way, people know whom to contact for more information or guidance on a particular project.